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I enjoyed my summer break (hello, Sweden & France and quite a few friends’ weddings!) and then started a new job. Life has been busy! I’m not claiming I’ll blog as regularly as I used to, but wanted to at least share a few things from the units we’ve done so far. Up first: The Kissing Hand.

What a nice story to kick off the year. Quite a few of our students have some difficulty separating from their parents, especially at the beginning of the year, so it’s a good pick. A few ideas:

-For following directions, I made a visual with a photo of a mother raccoon and a baby raccoon. I laminated/velcroed hearts and applied velcro to the raccoons’ hands, heads, tails, etc. The students were asked to give Chester a kiss on his hand, put a kiss on his mom’s tail, etc. They also got to put the hearts wherever they wanted, and tell us what they chose.

–Question of the week: at the end of our unit, I copied three scenes from the story (Mom kissing Chester, Chester kissing Mom, Chester going to school) and—with laminated/magnet photos of each child—had them cast their vote for their favorite scene. Especially with a citizenship unit coming up, we want to get used to voting! Good for introducing concepts like most/least.

–Parent communication: I sent home all the visuals from the story (which we used during quite a few readings of the book to listen/match/label) and visuals for questions the students answered from the story. Boardmakershare has more visuals for questions made by other users.

-iPad: I used “PeekaBoo Forest”, which has a lot of the animals from The Kissing Hand. Good for labeling forest animals and the changing seasons.

I’ve had some requests via email to share some of my Google Docs. I believe all of them are open to anyone who follows a link from here or sees one elsewhere, so this shouldn’t be necessary. Please let me know if you’re having issues accessing anything!

I didn’t really plan to take a hiatus this summer, but that’s how it’s worked out! Did summer school this year, but that wrapped up last week and now I’m truly on summer break (off to Europe next week!). I actually just accepted a new job (still in early childhood), so am really excited to start the new school year and I’m sure will have lots to post.

Thought I’d post the books we used for summer school in our speech/OT/social work group to coordinate with our themes (+ a few ideas).

Ocean:The Pout Pout Fish (we followed directions—finding a fish or frog and crawling through a tunnel to hand it off to an adult, labeling it; sang this song (“Let’s Go Swimming”); sorted ocean vs. farm animals with Boardmaker visuals and beanie babies; identified animals with the Peek-a-Boo Ocean app).

Zoo: 1,2,3, to the Zoo & Goodnight Gorilla(we matched zoo animal legos, identified plenty of zoo animals on the iPad, made a zoo of our own with beanie babies, made zoo animals with playdoh)

Vacation: Flip Flop (we packed a suitcase to go on vacation with lots of Miss Elena’s clothes, spread out beach towels/pretended to go to the beach, pretended to surf and spot ocean animals while dancing to to “Surfin’ USA”, made sandwiches for a beach picnic with this great kit).

Here are a couple of simple SMARTBoard activities. Could be used to target spatial concepts receptively or expressively, following directions, medial or final /s/ at the phrase level (Where’s the dog? In the castle/doll house), labeling furniture or rooms of the house, etc. Enjoy!

Have a wonderful weekend. I know I need to work on 5ish IEPs today, so time to get crackin’! May, you are intense.

After spotting this activity on Speech Language Play, I printed and laminated it. Today I used it with one of my students who is just starting to answer “wh” questions consistently with visuals. I hid each box under a post-it note, so he had the added excitement of uncovering each picture scene. I was inspired to make a few similar boards of my own. You can download ones for Dora, Thomas, and Spiderman below. Head on over to Speech Language Play for a nice printout with preposition symbols.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Day to all the fantastic teachers out there! I know that, as a school SLP, I’ve also felt very spoiled this week and it’s fabulous. 🙂 One of my three-year-old boys came in bearing carnations today. Pretty adorable. Enjoy the treats and appreciation!

This week’s book was Icky Sticky Frog. We have enough copies for each student to hold their own (the tongue/fly attachment on the book is quite the hit), which they always like! Gives us a nice chance to review some of our academic vocabulary (cover, title, author, illustrator, back cover, etc). It’s a nice story for sequencing/recalling: what did the frog eat first? Next? After reading the story we got out a bouncy frog and set up bug visuals around it. The students each got to pick a frog bean bag, bounce it, and label/describe the insect to which their frog landed the closest (e.g. caterpillar: long, green, fuzzy, will be a butterfly). Then we split into two fine motor groups—-one went to make caterpillars with paint, another used tongs to go on a “bug hunt” in two “bean boxes”. Students described the bugs they found. Question of the day: If you could be a bug, what bug would you be (answers were actually pretty great, especially from the students who could answer “why”)? Song:5 Green & Speckled Frogs